


You watching me watching you

by ghost_lingering



Category: Hard Core Logo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-05-09
Updated: 2004-05-09
Packaged: 2017-10-05 02:05:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_lingering/pseuds/ghost_lingering
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You watch Joe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You watching me watching you

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd, spoilers for the entire movie

You watch Joe, always have, but now you think you've figured him out. Joe's a fuck, to be bull shit metaphorical about it. He's fun, hard and fast, but, in the end, always leaves you aching a little. Feels real good, until after—after the booze and laughs and the spit in your face, when you're never sure how much was true, how much of yourself you lost in the process, how much you made yourself into a sell-out whore.

It's these things Joe doesn't understand.

He thinks you left Hard Core Logo to get rich, to get famous, because you thought you were better. That's part, yes, but there's the rest: how it became hard to separate the image from the reality, how Joe's as addicting as coke and just as dangerous, how you woke up one morning with a cigarette butt in your teeth and (his?) come down your throat and forgot what it was like to breath. So, when everything was falling apart anyways—John going schizo, Pipe going nowhere—you split.

Joe was too scared and too stubborn to admit you just needed something you couldn't find with HCL, that you wanted more from life than a second position which was interchangeable with first.

You still want more.

You want more than a groupie who named her kid for you, then left (freaked), when she found you took (could still take) it up the ass. Well, lady, you think into the opening of your vodka, I give it up the ass too, wanna watch?

It's true you're not as angry as you used to be, but that doesn't mean you can't get fucking annoyed. Joe. Joe can still sit and play car games, point out girls in dinners and tell their stories—funny and a little sad—can still write, damn he can still write, but just when he's got you again and you're back to hooked and desperate—he just.

You weren't annoyed with Joe using Bucky—hell you don't even like Bucky—but the rest, the want he has for the past, for the you and he that you both dreamed about. But his dream always differed from yours and, while both involved punk and drink and skin and sweat, you wanted it to expand and he wanted it to stay, wanted the past repeating, wanted what you can never get.

The past is never as good the second (third, fourth) time.

There are things you see—how he clings, really clings, to an image. "Fuck you" image. Bucky broke through, a little, but, then Joe went right back. It's why, as fucking excited as you are, as much as you want to share this with the best friend that Joe always seemed to be, you don't talk about Jennifur in front of him, don't let the interviewers fucking ask. There is a balance—always fucking broken because you're all first class pricks—but its what you have and you don't want it too banged up.

You watch Joe. His eyes flash and he half smiles in your direction, a reminder that he's not something to fuck with, that he owns you real good, made you (mother and father, both), that he took you last night in a room dark enough he was almost a ghost.

You watch Joe and you think he watches back, but you're not sure, because you didn't see some things you should have saw and you still have the bullet they handed you and you fuck a dead man you've never been able to escape and the vodka tastes as bitter as last night's come on the still tangled sheets.


End file.
